The Flaming Corsage

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed explores the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts, and furies in this thrilling novel in the Albany Cycle.

Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, The Flaming Corsage follows the lives of Edward Daugherty, a first generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright, and Katrina Taylor, a beautiful, seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life.  Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether.  

William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.